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Chumbawamba: Where Are They Now?

Boff Whalley—vocals, guitar, ukulele and clarinet. Forming the anarchist pop act Chumbawamba from his former band Chimp Eats Banana, Whalley went on to marry an American photographer and has been prominent in “fell running” (i.e., white people in fancy cross-trainers running across mountains), proving quite literally that a man can get back up again even after a period of sustained dormancy on the Billboard Hot 100.

Lou Watts—vocals, guitar, percussion and keyboards. No Wikipedia page, but, a moody sketch artist named Louis Watts does have a website where he hawks his minimalist sketches of Arizona geologic formations. Probably not the same person.

Alice Nutter—vocals and percussion. Her theatre work includes the provocative Foxes (2006) and the timely Where’s Vietnam? (2008) for the Red Ladder Theatre Company in West Yorkshire.

Dunstan Bruce—vocals, bass, sax, turntables and percussion. A YouTube clip of a guerrilla interviewer approaching a tall, pepper-bearded Mr. Bruce in a straw fedora at a tent city asking him if he’d prefer a “whiskey drink” or a “lager drink” and producing respective bottles of both.

Danbert Nobacon—vocals and keyboards. The philosophical “dark horse” of the working-class ensemble, Nobacon released a string of solo acoustic records in the 1980s meditating on anarchism, ecology, and scatology, including his “eco-concept” work, 1985’s The Unfairy Tale. He also remains notorious in certain circles of late-1980s U.K. avant-garde for his single “Bigger Than Jesus,” which explored male sexuality and featured as album cover a close up photograph of his own penis. Nobacon currently lives in Twisp, Washington with his family and his heroic cock.

Harry “Daz” Hamer—vocals, drums, programming and percussion. We can’t find Daz. But, some kid from Kent, U.K. has a Facebook page with that name and appears to be a flight attendant.

Jude Abbott—vocals, recorder, flute and trumpet. After playing the trumpet on “Tubthumper,” Abbott has fallen to giving small-press interviews and maintains a Twitter profile in which she refers to herself as an “enthusiastic crocheter.”

Neil Ferguson—vocals, guitar, and bass. Shares a name with an outspoken Harvard historian who engaged in a public spat with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who probably found Chumbawamba’s labor politics-meets-Euro-disco “vital.”

Davis “Mavis” Dillon—vocals, trumpet, French horn and bass. Apparently dead and buried, in Dayton, Ohio. Also 85 years old.

Phil Moody—accordion and vocals. Described by Jude Abbott as “doing all the funny bits,” such as comedy one-liners and reciting poetry during shows. Moody joined the band for 2008 Glastonbury Festival and appears on the band’s LP of the same year, The Boy Bands Have Won.

Paul Greco—bass. According to a fansite from the early 2000s still floating around in URL limbo, Greco played a Fender and left in 1999 in a “friendly split.” On leaving Britain’s most popular labor-union-supporting pop sensation, Chumbawamba: he says, “[N]o big arguments, no legal wranglings, no musical differences, no time in rehab and no expose in the Sunday papers. Just a man on a mission to make his own music.” Of course, we haven’t heard from him since.

Chumbawamba remained a viable, non-ironic quad-syllabic word to say long into the 2Ks. While the band split in 2012, they did release a LP flagellating former PM Margaret Thatcher upon her death—which they recorded back in 2005.

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Dunstan McGill grew up in isolated wealth on a family-owned island off Maine, where he was kept constant solace by his confidant and riding horse, Aloysius. After graduating from an exclusive, private boy's academy, he spent four years chasing pygmy goats in the mountainlands of New Guinea, before returning to the States, to accept the chairmanship of a gold-mining magnate, bequeathed to him by his dead father. He has since sold the company and spends his days strapped to a windsurf board, working on an unfinished memoir the New Yorker has already declared "an epic statement of letters--perhaps the last, best word on mankind we could hope for." When he's not avoiding the lurking eye of the British Press, Mr. McGill writes blog entries on blind dates at seedy, midwestern bowling alleys. The notorious, albeit fashion-savvy recluse has had a tempestuous on-again, off-again affair with an ex-Russian model/ballerina. He has no children. And he often plays himself to sleep at night, with Chopin on his white, grand piano.